Sunday, August 2, 2015

Brand New: Daisy

Eight years into their recording career, it is
difficult to expect that a band like Brand New — who, by this time, should really start thinking about a name
change — would be able to properly sur­prise their audiences. Most of the
critics who agreed to discuss Daisy
kinda sorta agreed that it was a «serious» effort, and that the band decided to
explore darker and subtler topics, and that evil word «maturity» also made more
than a single appearance, but you could also kinda sorta sense from the reviews
that nobody was really stunned by
this maturity. Because it is not as if Lacey or Accardi mastered any new skills
here, or acquired any specific insight. They are still willing to experiment
and look for new ways to express their irrational dissatisfaction with what­ever
comes their way — that much is obvious. But they're still not geniuses. And
they still have solid potential to annoy and irritate, rather than amaze and
hypnotize.

Take the lead (and only) single, ʽAt The
Bottomʼ. The word «bottom», unless you use it in a sexu­al sense (but then you
use different prepositions), usually suggests the idea of desperation, being at
the end of one's rope. How does the music agree with it? It never really gets
more despe­rate than the somber bluesy electric guitar introduction — then the
verse melody is really just this one nicely bent chord, which then explodes
into a nice mess of slide guitar on the loud chorus, but how «bottom» is that?
And how convincing are those vocals, trying once again to convey an aura of
suffering and frustration — but failing, as far as I'm concerned, because the
music is limp and the lyrics are just too twisted for their own good?
"There's a lake / And at the bottom you will find my friends / They don't
swim cause they're all dead / We never are what we intend or invent" —
look, this is frickin' embarrassing, I'm just too old to pay serious attention
to this shit. Where's old Jim Morrison when you really need him? At least he laid his pretentiousness right on the
line, not trying to pseudo-invent his own philosophical system from hastily
scrapped together pieces of existentialist broodings. Once Lacey writes
something as cool as "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The
future's uncertain and the end is always near", please wake me up.

And it's not as if it's a bad song, really — I like the way how the guitar melody
progresses from intro to verse to chorus, and I do find the chorus somewhat
catchy, and I like that they do not re­sort to all-out screaming. The only
thing I don't like, in fact, is that
there are no traces of a guitar solo — something that could really help out
here, but, well, you know, wishing for a guitar solo on an indie rock song is
like wishing for a sex scene in a Disney movie. So, all in all, I should be
kept happy here, and happily recommend the song to everybody. And yet — it just
feels so in­adequate to the task. All these references to lake bottoms,
darkness, little lies, drowning in floods, "drugs on a silver plate",
they just feel pulled out of one's ass, set to feeble musical backing, and then
packaged as Great Human Tragedy. And it doesn't exactly feel «fake» — like
before, it feels confused. They're trying to get it out, but they don't know
how.

Now let us take the second longest song on the
album: ʽYou Stoleʼ, which, at six minutes running time, forms the central
pillar of Daisy. It takes almost
three minutes to build up to the (first) cli­max — and the guys should be
congratulated for avoiding the usual trap, as all the lyrics are de­livered in
a hushed, mourning tone, whereas the loud climax is purely instrumental (but
even there they play a shrill
double-tracked guitar riff rather than a solo!). But that long build-up peri­od
— during most of that, they sound like a handicapped tribute band to British
Sea Power, mimi­cking their love for depth, echoes, hush-hush, and mystery, but
only possessing like half of that band's skill for instrumental overlays that
actually provide the depth. Again, there is a semi-successful attempt at
achieving something — but no
bullseye.

Now let us go to something really pretentious and cryptic. ʽIn A Jarʼ has a guitar riff that
sounds like it were, in fact, played from within a jar, with the lid screwed on
so tightly it can barely let through a microphone cord. It also has a tricky
time signature, with a slightly offbeat rhythm that confuses the senses. Then
there are the words: "We live in a jar and think the lid's the sky"
(what is this, a rerun of The Truman Show?),
"you're hoping for a savior on your cross outside" (outside the jar? is
it you or the savior that is outside? I'm sort of confused with these pronouns
here), "stars are just a million little fireflies" (nice simile, but
hardly original), "the sun is just a hole, it's the light outside"
(have they been reading too much Einstein?). Then, unfortunately, there's some
screaming in the chorus, but you also get the major decoding clue: "No one
saves me cause I'm sinking slowly!". Then you're supposed to go mad with
desperation and really feel for the guy, and for the whole universe, because your
eyes have just been opened to the meaninglessness and pointlessness of it all.

Okay, honestly, I know that silly sarcasm can
be used as a weapon against anything and anybody, so you are perfectly entitled
to seeing this as a series of cheap shots. What is expensive, though, is the
actual feelings I get when listening to this stuff — and they are almost
surprisingly neutral. Once again, Brand New just... deliver. Deliver a piece of
product that makes me respect them for their efforts, but does not make me love
them for the success of these efforts. As long as Lacey does not scream (and,
unfortunately, he does that quite a bit on many of the other songs), Daisy is perfectly listenable. It is
even meaningful — it sweats and struggles a lot to intellectualize its emotions
and emotionalize its intellect. But it just feels way too much like the
presupposition is "We suffer" and the rest is a desperate search for
the answer to the question "Why exactly is it that we are
suffering?", when it actually should feel the other way around — "something is not right", and then
"we suffer because something is not right". And this is why, no
matter how much I try, I just cannot relate to this album and its alleged
complexity.

I guess I will just finish this with another
bloody comparison: every time I hear Lacey proclaim that "I'm on my way to
hell" in the closing number, I close my eyes and just hum the chorus to
AC/DC's ʽHighway To Hellʼ, and think that, well, whaddaya know, so many people
on their way to hell, and each of them has his own attitude about that, and
even if in my own life I would pro­bably be closer to Lacey's personality than to
Bon Scott's, in this particular case I'd rather relate to Bon's attitude than
Lacey's. Take my word for it — if you're really
on your way to hell, don't bo­ther about puffing and huffing and aggrandizing
yourself about it. In the end, that's just vanity, and dressing it up in
superficial complexity and cryptic verbalizing won't make it into something
else — certainly not into genuine, convincing, empathetic suffering.